The 5 'Tiers' of TTRPG Publishing

Cannibal Halfling Gaming published an interesting article recently in which they divided tabletop roleplaying game publishers into five tiers, based on annual revenue. Here were their categories, but you should check out the article for a deeper dive.

~$500 million annual: D&D
~$50 million annual: Paizo
~$5 million annual: Steve Jackson Games
~$500K annual: Evil Hat Productions
~Everyone else (up to $100K)

They chose one example publisher per tier; they didn't list every TTRPG publisher. That's why your favourite publisher is not on that list of 4 companies. But feel free to add to the list!

Also, we talked about it in last week's episode of Morrus' Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk, for those who prefer to absorb their news in video format!

 

[MGibster]

For example, the “impression” I get from various posts and comments about Steve Jackson Games is that they can only afford to pay the bills and therefore don’t innovate much on some of their product lines - like GURPS, for example.

I think Steve Jackson is a savvy businessman who correctly read the market and decided it was in the company's best interest to focus on more profitable lines of business like Munchkin rather than GURPS. I like GURPS, but I don't think that type of game is to the tastes of enough gamers to make it worthwhile to focus on. But who knows? There might be a GURPS renaissance at some point.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think Steve Jackson is a savvy businessman who correctly read the market and decided it was in the company's best interest to focus on more profitable lines of business like Munchkin rather than GURPS. I like GURPS, but I don't think that type of game is to the tastes of enough gamers to make it worthwhile to focus on. But who knows? There might be a GURPS renaissance at some point.

We can only hope. I want Sim to make a comeback! Tired of people archly telling me how unpopular my playstyle is.

 

[Rob F]

I wonder where Free League sits on this list. Love those guys. They got some great games.

 

[Epic Meepo]

Hey, I'm in the "everyone else" category! Woo hoo!

Me, too! Tens of dollars annual revenue. Tens, I say!

 

[CommodoreKong]

My guess for the tier 2 category ($5M - $50M):

• Paizo Inc.
• Chaosium Inc.
• Free League Publishing (Fria Ligan)
• Modiphius Entertainment
• Monte Cook Games?
• Goodman Games?

Maybe MCDM on the low end of that scale when you include the kickstarters, patreon, sales of current Draw Steel products and sales of legacy DnD products.

 

[Dyson Logos]

What........ what about that changed?

Mainly the timeline. I expected that to start in 20 years, not imminently.

 

[MGibster]

We can only hope. I want Sim to make a comeback! Tired of people archly telling me how unpopular my playstyle is.

I certainly didn't mean to be archly about it at all. I'm sympathetic to your plight because I find myself in the same boat. While there are still people who play GURPS, and some of the other games I miss playing, it's difficult to find other players because they're just not popular. I imagine at some point in the future we'll get RPG hipsters dressing like it's the 1990s and playing artisanal GURPS or something like that.

 

[Peter BOSCO'S]

Dying in the climate wars before retirement?

Maybe he decided that the AI's will kill us all before the Climate Wars happen? AKA - the climate will be fine (except near our nuclear power plants) because once the AI's kill off humanity they will die off too for lack of people to maintain them, and pollution will stop?

 

[Von Ether]

I find this discussion a bit more useful than the one time a fellow tried to pitch the industry only had two categories, "Professional" which was WotC and Piazo, and "Indie" which was everyone else. If found this bizarre on several different levels, never mind the "Professional' tier was based on two outlier companies or that indie companies lacked professionalism.

We can only hope. I want Sim to make a comeback! Tired of people archly telling me how unpopular my playstyle is.

For me, system matters when doing Sim. GURPS and BRP are natural fits. To me, every edition of D&D creates extra work when doing Sim and many DMs assume hexcrawl= sim play and thus try to add more square pegs and round holes.

Also I ran GURPS with about five pages of combat rules. SIm doesn't have to be complex.

 

[Cergorach]

We can only hope. I want Sim to make a comeback! Tired of people archly telling me how unpopular my playstyle is.

shrugs Having grown up in an era when (around here) RPGs, card, board, miniature, etc. games were unpopular I don't really care how other people think of things I like. You do you! But that doesn't mean we have to ignore the realities of the RPG market. Those realities mean that for a company that owns that IP, they need to change to keep functioning in that a particular bracket. WotC couldn't have gotten D&D to these revenue levels if they didn't change with a market that could sustain those revenue levels.

I find this discussion a bit more useful than the one time a fellow tried to pitch the industry only had two categories, "Professional" which was WotC and Piazo, and "Indie" which was everyone else. If found this bizarre on several different levels, never mind the "Professional' tier was based on two outlier companies or that indie companies lacked professionalism.

You could argue that something is 'professional' when you earn the majority of your income with it and you could live on that. You could argue a lot more, especially in the margins. But when you pay a bunch of full time employees and a bunch of full time freelancers, 'you're solidly in the 'professional' side of things. That does not mean that everyone acts 'professional' all the time...

And that's not just in the pnp RPG business. The levels of professionalism in a 220k people Enterprise multinational are completely different from a small 5 man business office. It's also the reason why so many small businesses do not survive the transition from a small to a larger company... We tend to see only the ones that do survive.